ABSTRACT
The primary concern of infrastructures, especially the foundation that supports or maintains mass transportation facilities, is safety. This is the key focus of all large-scale transportation infrastructure projects, that is, roads, highways, and trains including the mass rapid transit (MRT), light rail transit (LRT), and bus rail transit (BRT). Failure in road and rail networks has serious ramications especially when human lives are lost. One such disaster occurred at the Penang Ferry Terminal in Butterworth, Malaysia on 31 July 1988, when the supporting steel structures in the bridge collapsed because of overloading, killing 32 people and injuring 1634. Common modes of structural failure in transportation infrastructure include cracks, deformation, corrosion, ground settlement, fatigue, and fracture. These catastrophes are caused by factors such as improper or inadequate selection of materials, overloading, faulty design, and natural calamities.
